Iran’s foreign minister said this week that his government would not ship its stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country, making him the highest ranking official so far to declare that Iran would renege on a deal aimed at defusing a confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, sent confusing messages this week.

“We will definitely not send our 3.5-percent-enriched uranium out of the country,” Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister, told the semiofficial ISNA news agency in remarks reported Wednesday.

But Iran has repeatedly sent mixed signals on the nuclear issue, and it was not immediately clear if Mr. Mottaki was staking out a negotiating position or issuing a final rejection of the deal that Iran’s negotiating team agreed to last month in Vienna.

While he said that enriched uranium would not be sent abroad, he also said Iran would consider “a simultaneous swap” in which it would give up some of its stockpile after it received more highly enriched fuel. The swap would have to take place on Iranian soil, he said.

In an interview with ISNA published Wednesday, Mr. Mottaki emphasized the rejection. But in an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Hindu, earlier this week, he seemed to emphasize Iran’s willingness to find a compromise.

“We believe that with the continuation of the diplomacy going on now, it is possible to reach an agreement and compromise,” he said in comments published in Monday’s edition of The Hindu and reprinted in the English-language Tehran Times. “Complementary suggestions and proposals are being sent and received by both sides.”

In Vienna, a representative of the International Atomic Energy Agency was uncertain what to make of the foreign minister’s remarks, saying it was unclear if they were a formal response from the Iranians or simply his personal view.

Iran appeared to reject the deal late last month, but neither the State Department nor the nuclear agency considered that a formal response. When the agency does get a formal response from Tehran, the atomic energy agency representative added, it will address the issue publicly.

The United States and Europe have said that they accepted the initial proposal because it would delay Iran’s ability to produce fuel for a nuclear weapon and allow time for further negotiations over its nuclear program. The proposal involved sending about three-quarters of Iran’s declared stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country to be further enriched, turned into fuel rods and returned to a nuclear reactor in Tehran that makes medical isotopes. The Western nations calculated that it would take about a year for Iran to replace the uranium.

But in Tehran, where officials insist their nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, the deal was attacked from across the political spectrum. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemed to suggest it was acceptable, he was criticized from all sides, even by the reformists he long called too soft on the West.

Mr. Mottaki’s statement was one of three recent developments relating to Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran experts said they probably were all connected. The first involved a report by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, who examined a recently revealed enrichment laboratory being built inside a mountain on a military base near the city of Qum. The lab is too small to produce the quantity of fuel needed for a commercial reactor, they said, suggesting it was designed more for making fuel for a weapon.

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